Stir-Fry Tofu

September 4, 2013

Once in a while, something comes out of my kitchen as a happy accident. Today I was planning to cook Creamy Butter Tofu. With much enthusiasm and already anticipating the delicious dinner ahead of me, I opened up my package of pre-cut firm tofu only to discover that the cubes were tiny. Teeny tiny! Not at all what I needed. I needed large cubed tofu to absorb the creamy sauce, so this would not work at all. Left with an opened package of tofu, I had to figure out some way to use them. Stir-fry! Innovative, no?

When you start concocting a new recipe out of necessity to use up food in your fridge and avoid waste, a whole range of possibilities open up. Should I cook this in a sweet and sour sauce,? A white sauce maybe? Or maybe dark sauce? How about no sauce at all? I finally settled on a dark sauce, basing it loosely off my recipe for Hot Plate Tofu.

So here we have a simple tofu stir-fry: The tofu is dusted with cornstarch and deep-fried to a crispy golden brown to make it more appetizing and paired together with crisp carrots, smoky mushrooms and tender shrimp. You can add in green onions for a burst of color, I didn’t have them at the time. I think it was a pretty good way to salvage tiny cubes of tofu, don’t you?